Life in the Sick-Room Quotes

“The truth is, as all will declare who are subject to a frequently recurring pain, a familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead of becoming lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. The general sense of alarm which it probably occasioned when new, may have given way and disappeared before a knowledge of consequences, and a regular method of management or endurance; but the pain itself becomes more odious, more oppressive, more feared, in proportion to the accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“The reason may speak, and even through the lips, of hope and courage ; but the sensation of which I speak is peculiar ; so peculiarly connected with bodily agony, that I cannot but believe it felt wherever bodily agony is felt. It has nothing to do with the courage of the soul ; affords not the shadow of contradiction to patience, fortitude, religious trust, I mean simply that when extreme pain seizes on us, down go our spirits, fathoms deep ; and, though the soul may yet be submissive and even willing, the sickening question rises, — " How shall I bear this for five minutes? What will become of me?" And if the imagination stretches on to an hour, or hours, there is no word but despair which expresses the feeling. The bystanders can never fully understand this suffering ; no, though they may themselves have suffered to extremity.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Biography will never fail. Would that we were all equally secure of a higher matter, — our right of freedom of epistolary speech !”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“The weakest sufferers are precisely those who are least able to appropriate the future and its good things. If this be true of the weak, and if the strong find it irritating to be medicined with soft fictions, or presented with anything but sound truth, the popular method of consolation appears to be excluded altogether. If my own life were to be lived over again, I should, from the strength of this conviction, convert most of its words of intended consolation into a far more consolatory condolence. Never”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood, of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former state of my mind. It is this ; that it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“We all know how the present action of our new civilization works to the impairing of Privacy. As new discoveries are causing all penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication, work to reduce privacy much within its former limits. There are some limits, however, which ought to be preserved with vigilance and care, as indispensable, not only to comfort, but to some of the finest virtues and graces of mind and life. It is to be hoped that the privacy of viva voce conversation will ever remain sacred : but it is known that that which ought to be as holy, that of epistolary correspondence, — (the private conversation of distant friends) is constantly and deliberately violated, where there are certain inducements to do so.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“But when my heart has sickened at the sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is temporary, — that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were not from causes which are remediable. Then I cannot but look forward to the time when the bad training of children, — the petulancies of neighbors — the errors of the ménage — the irksome superstitions, and the seductions of intemperance, shall all have been annihilated by the spread of intelligence, while the mirth at the minutest jokes — the proud plucking of nosegays — the little neighborly gifts, (less amusing hereafter, perhaps, in their taste) — the festal observances — the disinterested and refined acts of self-sacrifice and love, will remain as long as the human heart has mirth in it, or a humane complacency and self-respect,”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Are we not growing sensibly more merciful, more wisely humane towards empirics themselves, when they cease to be our oracles ? Are we not learning, from their jumbled discoveries and failures, that empiricism itself is a social function,”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Meantime, what a work is done! Amidst the flat contradictions of fact, and oppositions of opinion, — amidst the passion which sets men's wits to work to conceive of and propose all imaginable motives and results, what an abundance of light is struck out ! From a crowd of falsehoods, what a revelation we have of the truth, which no one man, nor party of men, could reveal! — of the wants, wishes, and ideas of every class or coterie of society that can speak for itself, and of some that cannot !”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Nothing is more impossible to represent in words, even to one's self in meditative moments, than what it is to lie on the verge of life and watch, with nothing to do but to think, and learn from what we behold. Let any one recall what it is to feel suddenly, by personal experience, the full depth of meaning of some saying, always believed in, often repeated with sincerity, but never till now known. Every one has felt this, in regard to some one proverb, or divine scriptural clause, or word of some right royal philosopher or poet. Let any one then try to conceive of an extension of this realization through all that has ever been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavoring to imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the experience is, we have each to bear it alone ; for each of us is surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a different office ; — and if not, it is one of those experiences which are incommunicable.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Rouse me from the depression of pain, wake me up from sleep for the better refreshment of this news, and I will rejoice ; but do not think to enhance your tidings by telling me that these things are my doing. The only effect of that is, to remind me how much better the service might have been done. Surely we both believe that all truth and goodness are destined to arise sooner or later among men. To be visited with new or good ideas is a blessing : to be appointed to communicate them is an honor : but these blessings and honors are a ground for personal humility, not complacency.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“Far different was my emotion, when one said to me, with a face like the face of an angel, '' Why should we be bent upon your being better, and make up a bright prospect for you ? I see no brightness in it; and the time seems past for expecting you ever to be well." How my spirits rose in a moment at this recognition of the truth !”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“In a sharp sickness of a few days or weeks, all good and kind people act and speak much alike; are busy and ingenious in hastening the recovery, and providing relief meantime. It is when death is not to be looked for, nor yet health, that the test is applied ; that, on either hand, the genius and the awkwardness of consolation present themselves, with a vast gradation between these extremes. It is easy and pleasant to be grateful for all, and to appreciate the love and pity which inspire them ; but it is impossible to relish all equally, or to give the same admiration to that which flows forth fully and freely, and that sympathy which is suppressed, restricted, or in any way changed before it reaches its object. O ! what a heavenly solace to the soul is free sympathy in its hour of need !”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays

“True and consoling as it may be for him, and for those about him, to find thus that " trouble may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," they have not fully learned the lessons of the sick room if they are not aware that, while the troubles of that night season are thus sure to pass away, its product of thoughts and experiences must endure, till the stars which looked down upon the scene have dissolved in their courses. The constellations formed in the human soul, out of the chaos of pain, must have a duration compared with which, those of the firmament are but as the sparkles showered over the sea by the rising sun. To one still in this chaos, — if he do but see the creative process advancing, — it can be no reasonable matter of complaint, that his course is laid the while through such a region ; and he will feel almost ashamed of even the most passing anxiety as to how soon he may be permitted to emerge.”
― Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room - Essays